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other bank. Again, nothing. Darkfur was gone.

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    Gone, gone, echoed Wolf's lonely howls.

    Torak started along his pack-brother's trail. When the snow-crust is too hard for paw prints, a wolf leaves barely any trace--a few flakes of frost brushed off a branch, a frond of bracken bent slightly out of place--but Torak tracked Wolf almost without having to think. His trail headed south, up the side of the valley and down into the next: a rocky, steep-sided gully.

    Torak recognized it at once: the valley of the Fastwater. When he was little, he and Fa used to camp there in early summer, to gather lime bark for rope making.

    The river was frozen now, but three summers ago it had been a torrent. Torak recognized the big red rock shaped like a sleeping auroch. Beneath it he had found a pack of drowned wolves lying in the mud. And a small, wet, shivering cub.

    Crossing the frozen river, he started to climb.

    He went very still.

    An arrow had been lashed with a twist of creeper to the trunk of a birch tree about ten paces above the auroch rock. It pointed east, toward the High Mountains.

    Holding his breath, Torak climbed closer. He studied the fletching but didn't dare touch. The arrow had belonged to Fa.

    As if his father had spoken aloud, Torak heard his voice in his mind. Help me. Set my spirit free.

    Maybe Fin-Kedinn was right, maybe Eostra was

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    making use of Fa's arrow. But Torak couldn't forget that lost spirit calling in the night. If Eostra was summoning him to her Mountain lair, then so was Fa.

    And yet--if he headed east, as Fa's arrow begged him to, he would be abandoning Wolf.

    Torak stood irresolute, fists clenched inside his mittens. Should he follow the dead, or seek the living?

    He knew what Fin-Kedinn would have done.

    Facing the invisible Mountains, he lifted his head. "You tried to separate me from my pack-brother," he shouted to the Eagle Owl Mage. "Well, you won't succeed. I won't let you!"

    Turning his back on his father's arrow, he headed south.

    To find Wolf.

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    SEVEN

    It turned colder and colder as Fin-Kedinn headed north.

    The night before, there had been a ring around the moon, and the stars had flickered with an intensity he'd rarely seen. Storm on the way. The clan would have pitched camp early. He must do the same.

    He crossed the Tumblerock at the Boar Clan camp, then made his way into the valley of the Rushwater. He was now less than a daywalk from the Windriver, where the Ravens had camped in the time of the demon bear. He thought of the day when Renn and her brother had brought in two captives: a wolf cub squirming in a

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    buckskin bag, and a bedraggled and furious boy....

    The Rushwater echoed noisily between its ice-choked banks, but the Forest had a peculiar, waiting stillness. Fin-Kedinn realized that he'd seen no birds all day, save for a few last, lonely swans flying south.

    And no people. The frosts had killed the gray moths, but the victims of the shadow sickness remained terrified, and their terror infected others. Most people were staying close to camp, only braving the Forest when hunger drove them.

    So it was good to encounter a small Viper hunting party: three men and a boy, hurrying west to rejoin their clan. They'd caught two squirrels and three wood pigeons. It wasn't much, but they urged Fin-Kedinn to come with them and share.

    "Bad weather on the way," said one. "Dangerous to be in the Forest alone." Out of respect, he didn't ask what the Leader of the Ravens was doing so far from his clan.

    Fin-Kedinn declined the offer and ignored the unspoken question. Instead, he told them of the gathering of the clans.

    "The Ravens have already set off, and I told the Boar Clan when I passed their camp; they'll have left by now; and Durrain has sent word throughout the Deep Forest. Go back to your people and tell your Leader. If the clans stay together, we will remain strong. Even against Eostra."

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    That he dared speak her name aloud gave them